1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to data networks and in particular to client requests in data networks. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to the fulfillment of client requests in data networks.
2. Description of the Related Art
Internet computing has become increasingly important in modern business and in people's daily lives. This increasing importance is also accompanied by greater network routing demands. The simple traditional symmetric cluster routing (infrastructure) which utilizes a set of servers that deploy the identical service in all of the servers is incapable of meeting millions of concurrent and dynamically changing client requests. In a simple symmetric cluster, several servers host the same services and access to any service may be obtained from any server. In the symmetric grid or cluster, deploying all services to all endpoints is very inefficient because there are different demands for different services. For example, given a grid/cluster of 5000 server endpoints and 9000 different services, if 9000 services are deployed into all of 5000 servers, complexities and inefficiencies abound since all of these 9000 different services have different demands and requirements. Of even greater complexity is a solution which comprises 9000 clusters of 5000 servers and which deploys each of 9000 services to each of 9000 clusters.
However, Web Services, Service-Oriented Architecture, and Asymmetrical Cluster routing infrastructures are capable of meeting the requirements of millions of diverse applications and services. In addition, millions of concurrent client requests may be met with neither (1) any over-deployment of servers/resources being under-loaded from insufficient traffic, nor (2) any under-deployment bottleneck caused by over-loading traffic. However, transferring a very complicated and dynamically changing routing table to a client in order to guide routing decisions is one of the more difficult problems that differentiate new asymmetric cluster/grid routing from simple traditional cluster routing.
The asymmetric cluster solution is to deploy each of the (previously referenced) 9000 services onto a subset of 5000 server endpoints according to each service's demand, and each server endpoint may have a different role and unique set of resources allocated for different services at different times. Thus, asymmetric clusters function as the modern dynamic infrastructure for service-oriented architectures. With an asymmetric cluster (routing) infrastructure, grid/cluster and application management is simplified, and an enterprise has full control with this infrastructure. However, routing in an asymmetric cluster is much more complicated due in part to the dynamic assignment of roles and services to servers.